The Writers' Circle

October 17th 2010: Washington DC - 

One footstep: a silent thud, a murmurous echo; too insignificant a notion of sound to raise alarm in the blooming, buzzing metropolis of Washington DC. 10 000 footsteps, a clamorous roar, an impending drumbeat echoing in the very foundations of the city: the feet of it's inhabitants, the city's living breathing heartbeat sounding the meter of their march. Left, right, left, right, lift, stomp, scuff, and pound: pound the message into the streets, the marchers's explicit refrain. 

***

The thumb, pressed tight against the wound; the wound too wide for the thumb; the thumb unable to prevent, the fervour of coursing blood; the blood that spills onto the sheets; the sheets that were so clean. The purity of the institution enforced globally to uphold freedom and liberty and universal rights, inaliable; god given or not. Demos, the people, the philosopher king, all put in place to offer one thing; sanctity from oppression and means to live life; and safety form the reds and their thirst for civil strife. But the blood on the sheets, now trodden in by feet, into the grain of the street; the blood of the people, from the hearts of the free, is spilled for good cause: to replace the absentee. 

***

This refrain was printed a thousand times over, and was emboldened and bordered and held aloft, a thousand times over: replace the absentee. The footsteps rumbling like an approaching wave, the sound bouncing from the concrete formations that framed the street sending reverberating sprays of foaming echo over the torrential march below. The colossal wave would soon reach the isolated islands of the city upon which it would converge: submerging the institutions that had for so long held the lapping waves of the gentle tide at bay. 

***

Uniform matching uniform, the stoic foot-soldiers, sprung up onto the metal rung support step of the personnel carrier flinging in their weapons and bergens; the remaining few, scurrying fast to keep up with the pace of the already deploying vehicle: all were prepared for a hasty alight. Uniform marching echoed the booming monotony of synchronised steps, the peoples's advance: the workers's frontier. Soon they would meet, not on welcome terms, bullets make light work of human flesh. The thundering stampede met silence at last, outside the institutions: to shatter the glass. Violence ensued, this was no peaceful demonstration, gone was the time of bargaining and negotiations, the walls must be destroyed, the festering malignance sterilized: the fruitful blossom of the new shall bring a red morrow. Money is a powerful tool, more powerful than muscle, or bone or mass presence. Money buys guns, guns fire bullets, bullets kill people. 

Bullets tear the very flesh of society from the skeleton structure that lingers: evermore the deteriorating remnants of human nature.

***